AVG Internet Security 2013 offers the same powerful protection as AVG's free antivirus solution and its spam filter is better than almost any competing suite. I just don't see that it offers enough beyond what you get in the free antivirus to merit its price.

By Neil J. RubenkingOnline Shield and AVG AcceleratorThe one antivirus feature not found in AVG's free solution is Online Shield. This feature actively blocks access to known dangerous URLs. When I tried to re-download my current collection of malware threats using AVG's free antivirus, it blocked 77 percent of the still-valid ones immediately on completion of the download. Online Shield blocked almost half of those at the URL level, before the download even began.

I tried my usual antiphishing test on AVG, using the very newest phishing URLs, with no success. It let dozens of verified phishing URLs pass, blocking just one that turned out to be a malware-hosting site, not a phishing site. My AVG contact explained that processing URLs to make sure they're truly fraudulent can take several hours. Avoiding false positives is good, but effective antiphishing tools like what you'll find in Norton and Kaspersky detect fraud by analyzing content in real time; I've never seen either of them falsely accuse a valid site.

The suite also adds a feature called AVG Accelerator that's designed to speed up the downloading of binary files and enhance buffering to ensure smooth streaming. My performance tests can't specifically measure these types of speed enhancement, but YouTube videos did seem to load faster with this feature enabled.

Simplified FirewallBased on customer feedback and internal analysis, AVG's designers revamped the suite's firewall to make it simpler and less confusing. In particular, they removed some settings that the user just shouldn't change and moved others into "Expert mode" settings.

The firewall stealthed all of my test system's ports. None of my port scans and other Web-based attacks prevailed against it.

As far as program control goes, in the firewall's default automatic mode it automatically allows access for known good programs and assigns permissions for unknowns based on their behavior. You won't see any popup queries from the firewall unless you enable interactive mode.

Unfortunately, in interactive mode the firewall will query you about every program that attempts Internet access for the first time, even Internet Explorer. I'd prefer a mode that automatically assigns permissions for known programs and only pops up a query for unknowns.

For as long as firewalls have attempted program control, malware writers have devised techniques to let their programs manipulate or masquerade as trusted programs. Leak test programs demonstrate these techniques without actually doing anything malicious. In interactive mode AVG detected only a couple of the leak tests I tried.

Usually I test a firewall's resistance to exploit attacks using the Core IMPACT penetration testing tool. However, AVG's firewall doesn't attempt to detect and block these attacks so I omitted that test.

I couldn't disable the firewall by setting it to "off" in the Registry, and all attempts to kill its processes returned "Access denied." Alas, I had no trouble stopping the firewall service. This firewall is an improvement over the previous edition, but doesn't come close to the powerful, intelligent firewall technology used in top products like Norton and Kaspersky.

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